Apple and Meta are on speaking terms again
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly thanked Apple's new CEO John Ternus, and Ternus has written back. The exchange happened on X on Thursday, when Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open. That's Meta's new open-weight AI model, and the two companies spent months tuning it to run locally on Apple's Mac Studio desktops.
Zuckerberg shared a picture of Meta's AI agent at work on a Mac. He wrote that the model "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple."Ternus took over from Tim Cook last month. He replied "Congrats to the team!" and said Mac Studio "keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI." It is a far cry from 2021. That year, Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature hit Facebook's ad business, and Zuckerberg reportedly told employees the company needed to "inflict pain" on Apple.
Meta's most capable open AI model now runs on Apple's Mac Studio
Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter model built on a mixture-of-experts design. Meta calls it the most capable US-developed open-weight model to date. It is aimed at long coding sessions, multi-step reasoning and video analysis. The model is free to download from platforms like Hugging Face, and its licence allows commercial use with some limits.The setup links two or four Mac Studios running Apple's M5 Ultra chip.
Apple's MLX framework splits the model across those machines. Apple has also put out new benchmarks and technical notes on how MLX handles open models of this size. Since everything stays on the desk, Meta does not see the prompts or files developers feed it. "Meta has no control or visibility to any of that," Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said.It does not come cheap. An M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of memory costs over Rs 9 lakh at US prices, and the model needs at least two.
A 512GB version is due later this month.
Apple's privacy push cost Meta billions and sparked years of barbs
The bad blood goes back years. In 2018, at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked what he would do in Zuckerberg's shoes. "I wouldn't be in this situation," he said. Zuckerberg called the remark "extremely glib."Then iOS 14.5 arrived in 2021. It made apps ask permission before tracking users across other apps and websites, and most iPhone owners chose not to be tracked.
Meta later estimated the change would cut its 2022 revenue by $10 billion. As recently as last year, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that Apple "hasn't invented anything great since the iPhone."The two have not struck a public partnership since 2017, when Apple pulled Facebook's built-in integration from iOS.
A former Apple executive helped bring Meta and Apple back to the table
Wang credits Daniel Gross with getting the two sides to work together. Gross is a former Apple executive who joined Meta's AI push last year.
"Most of the animosity predates my tenure at the company," Wang said in an interview. He added that he was "excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again."Both sides get something here. Apple gets to show its chips can handle heavy AI work away from Nvidia-powered data centres. Meta gets its model in front of developers who might later pay to scale up. Apple already uses Google's Gemini models in Apple Intelligence, and its relationship with OpenAI has ended up in court.Neither company would say if more is coming. The real test would be Meta's models showing up inside Apple Intelligence. For now, the change is mostly one of tone. Five years after talking about inflicting pain on Apple, Zuckerberg is tagging its CEO by name, and Ternus is replying with exclamation marks.